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Tak Toyoshima

Boston, Massachusetts

Tak Toyoshima is the creative director of the Boston alternative weekly paper, DigBoston, and the creator and illustrator of the comic strip Secret Asian Man.

Tak was born in New York City and grew up on the borders of Chinatown, Little Italy, Soho and Tribeca. He later attended Boston University where he received a degree in advertising. Tak started working on his critically acclaimed comic strip, Secret Asian Man, in the summer of 1998. The strip started out appearing monthly in a local arts publication, Shovel Magazine.

Shovel Magazine was started by Tak and his wife with a group of their creative friends. Shovel Magazine had a circulation in the low thousands, but over time it’s popularity grew and it eventually evolved into Boston’s Weekly Dig, which in turn became DigBoston. The current weekly circulation of DigBoston is over 30,000 copies. Tak describes the Dig as “a hybrid of the traditional alternative newsweekly that our hippie forefathers started and new school magazine publishing blending award winning design and cutting edge content.” Secret Asian Man is still printed in DigBoston, but as we mentioned earlier Tak is the creative director for the publication, so he’s writing and illustrating S.A.M. on his own time.

Tak Toyoshima is also a contributor to New England Comics’ The Tick, a former cover artist for DigBoston, and has past experience as the creative director for BeerAdvocate Magazine. Secret Asian Man was included in Attitudes 2: The New Subversive Social Commentary Cartoonists and was also collected inSecret Asian Man: The Daily Days. Both are available online and in fine bookstores. You can follow Tak Toyoshima on Twitter, and connect with the DigBoston on Facebook.